VMware vSphere 6.0 support

[foggy]

As Anton has stated above, those with support cases open on some outstanding issues will get the update from your support engineer once we have RTM, prior to general availability at the end of April.

[hoFFy]

just as a site note... Symantec released BE v15 with VMware v6 Support

Any idea which special arguments to tell our customers or homepage visitors why Symantec has been faster? I'm just about to write an article for our homepage that (potential) customers should not upgrade to VMware 6, because Veeam doesn't support it yet. But when it comes to the discussions... WHAT to tell them why Symantec has been faster?

[Regnor]

It's not only about supporting newer software products, and also it's not a good idea to instantly upgrade to a major release.

[Gostev]

why Symantec has been faster?

Honestly, your question is best directed to Symantec - may be they can share why on their forums? I cannot know what did they sacrifice to achieve that: quality, features, platform support or (most likely) all of the above?

I can speak for Veeam only. We don't believe data protection software should be rushed, and we are also not in any sort of a racing game here. For many, many years now, we have been very consistent with the time frame of releasing support for the new vSphere releases: about 6 weeks from GA on average. Why would we do anything different with this particular release? Can you tell me a single good reason why should we be cutting down our standard testing cycles?

Thing is, long term backup reliability stress testing that we perform before releasing a new platform support simply cannot be accelerated - it can only be cancelled. Either we do this few weeks long stress test, or we released without it. What would your customers prefer? Should we cancel it, and release the RC build tomorrow?

I don't think it is a good idea. Especially when this testing has already resulted in us finding a major VDDK 6.0 bug with SAN transport. This bug did not exist in the previous VDDK versions, and can severely impact production environments. It was us who found and reported this bug to VMware - ALL other vendors have missed it in their testing, and just released their vSphere 6 support with it. I have covered this bug in more details in the weekly forum digest 2 days ago.

@Regnor I actually liked the previous version of your post (where you talked about innovations), you've made a very good point there. I am planning to take a look at the depth of their vSphere 6 support soon. Somehow, I have a feeling that they do not actually support majority of the new vSphere 6 features around data protection - only whatever comes "for free" by swapping the VDDK to a newer version. Does this sound like something Symantec would do to you?

[mysidia]

just as a site note... Symantec released BE v15 with VMware v6 Support

It would be a bit shortsighted to pick one product or another, just because they were able to rush a
major update out a week sooner. It's worth waiting at least another week for Veeam to release
an update for VS6 support.

I would sooner recommend VMware's VDP product than BE. The usable featureset of Symantec's
backup product is NOT comparable to Veeam's. Also, even products with shiny brand names that
can mark the same feature checkboxes are not necessarily good/comparable.

The time to deploy new version support in software can be influenced by many variables.
It would be a vast oversimplification of the situation to say that "Symantec has been faster".

[Regnor]

@Regnor I actually liked the previous version of your post (where you talked about innovations),

Well I thought that statement was a little too aggressive, so I've removed it

[hoFFy]

Thank you for your answers. My intention was to ask a bit provocative
You can be sure I know about the advantages of Veeam, longer quality tests and so an.
Btw.: Gostev I receive your newsletter during night (I live in Germany) and its always the first mail I read after my alarm clock rings
My hope was that you can give me some answers I haven't thought about yet.
The roadmap to release update 2 is still at the end of this month, even after you have found that VDDKbug and are creating a workaround? Our April and May are under the sign of Veeam... release of update 2, backup with Endpoint to our Veeam Repos, my personal VMCE 7 to 8 upgrade certification...

[Vitaliy S.]

The roadmap to release update 2 is still at the end of this month, even after you have found that VDDKbug and are creating a workaround?

Yes, that's correct.

[bgagnon]

First off, first post, and I registered specifically to comment on this thread. I've been a long time Veeam user - I find it to be my "go to guy" for VM restores when they are needed. It's not my / our only backup product, but at the end of the day its the only one I use probably 49 times out of 50.

One of the reasons for this is because of their QA process - they don't just release patches for the sake of making a few people happy. If our internal devs were to do that - just slam out an update without thoroughly testing the changes, that could have major implications and cause bigger issues down the road - which is exactly what we don't want.

Backups are, what I consider to be, a critical part of an infrastructure - especially production infrastructure. I would prefer that Veeam thoroughly test this patch before releasing it. Of course, we are nerds and impatient - we want to get on this latest version, but once again, there are critical parts of infrastructure that all need to be working together, and until it's verified that they are all working together, just wait it out. Spin up a lab with vSphere 6 and goof around with it in your lab if your desperate to get hands on it and play with it there.

I look at it this way - great that other vendors are already supporting it - good for them. But I use Veeam for a reason and Veeam is my go to guy for a reason, and this is one of those reasons - being cautious, but not overly cautious, internally testing their patches thoroughly before GA, not just slamming it out because a few people are whining on a forum - that is a good software development company.

When it's ready, it's ready. Until then, hang tight people.

[agossett]

That is correct. Limited availability next week, followed by general availability by the end of this month.

Is there a way to get on the Limited availability?

[Gostev]

For limited availability, support engineers select among the following users:

1. Those with a support case open on an issue that is addressed by Update 2, and
2. NOT using Veeam Cloud Connect (as service providers need time to upgrade).

Thanks!

[SyNtAxx]

is there a list of resolves issues/enhancements avail for Patch 2 ?

-Nick

[foggy]

The full list of improvements and new functionality will be available when the update will become generally available.

[Gostev]

I cannot know what did they sacrifice to achieve that: quality, features, platform support or (most likely) all of the above?

Just follow up on that, I have spent some time this weekend digging their documentation and indeed - just as I thought, they've sacrificed all of the above

Quality:
Aside of the VDDK issues mentioned above, they have knowingly released with an issue when VMware backup jobs may just stall indefinitely (from Release Notes). Killing the job process, and manual restart of all services required when this happens. You'd better hire a babysitter!

Features:
They have delivered only minimal vSphere 6 compatibility, basically only features you get mostly "for free" by replacing VDDK with the newer version. Which is a few times less features than FULL vSphere 6 support that we are delivering requires.

Platform support:
They have dropped support for vSphere 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0. This is insane! There are many companies still using these vSphere versions today, and moreover planning to continue to use them even half a year from now > [POLL] your VMware vSphere version plans for late 2015. We just can't do the same to our customers, even if it reduces the amount of required testing by half... VMware still fully supports these platforms, so how can we not be supporting them?

[jamerson]

They have dropped support for vSphere 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0. This is insane! There are many companies still using these vSphere versions today, and moreover planning to continue to use them even half a year from now > [POLL] your VMware vSphere version plans for late 2015. We just can't do the same to our customers, even if it reduces the amount of required testing by half... VMware still fully support these platforms, so how can we not be supporting them?

this the reason why one of my customers was forced to buy the Licenses 6.0 and update to fix the issue.
not directly to 5.5 other have to buy license twice.
Let hope Veeam wouldnt force us to buy the update 2 in order to support the vSphere 6.0 .

[Gostev]

Let hope Veeam wouldnt force us to buy the update 2 in order to support the vSphere 6.0

Definitely not. All product updates, and even new versions are free for customers on maintenance.

[azp]

Is this month, however, the correction will update 2 ?????????

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes.

[stanthewizzard]

end of this week
to bad I hoped it was for today

[Gostev]

Update 2 is now generally available. Thank you all for your patience!

[hoFFy]

Yeah
"Preparing to install..."

[clipper87]

When I download update 2 using Chrome browser then the ZIP file consistently reports a crc error when unzipping, downloading with firefox solved the matter but as I've never come across such an issue with Chrome I thought I'd report it here.

[foggy]

Frank, I've just successfully downloaded the update via Chrome browser and had no errors while unzipping it. Anyway, I will let our webteam know abut that. What is your browser version?

[Marc.H]

Downloaded - Installed - Backup works great and fast!

Thanks
Marc

[clipper87]

Alexander,

my Chrome version is 42.0.2311.90 m

Just tried again & ran winzip 14.5 again to extract resulting in this error:

Extracting to "C:\Scratch\"
Use Path: yes Overlay Files: no
Extracting VeeamBackup&Replication_8.0.0.2021_Update2.exe
CRC check failed

downloading via Firefox & unzipping via the same Winzip program works ok

[jbsengineer]

Is vSphere 6.0 support planned for Veeam 7.0?

Thanks,
Josh

[Gostev]

No, v7 is in support-only mode (no new functionality will be developed for it).

[AlexWhit]

Is it safe to upgrade to vsphere 6 now? i have been holding off. i have a new host i am about to install and if it is save i will put 6 on it.

Thanks

[Gostev]

From Veeam perspective, Update 2b is proven stable after a few weeks of its availability as far as vSphere 6 support. From VMware perspective, they have just released ESXi 6.0.0b and vCenter bits late last week, so I would hold off at least a few days before going with these new bits, as per usual recommended practice of letting someone else run into any potential newly introduced issues

[dustinn3]

With software is it ever safe?

I bit the bullet and installed vcenter 6 and added ESXI 6.0.0b host to test with. The rest of my hosts are still on 5.5, but everything seems to be working fine. The only issue I had was I forgot to re-add vcenter to Veeam to update the certificate. Plus it fixed an issue I was having with backups intermittently failing when using AD credentials, so I'm happy.